Use of AI against Filipino workers

We hereby share an article published by the Philippine Revolution Web Central (PRWC).

Sharing common grievances, BPO (business process outsourcing) and telecommunications workers, delivery drivers and other jobs run by digital platforms (or online systems) formed the Coalition of Digital Employees-Artificial Intelligence or CODE-AI on January 25. The said coalition was established to represent workers and employees amid expanded use of AI technology by foreign companies. CODE-AI is composed of BIEN, Riders Watch, Gabay sa Unyon sa Telekomunikasyon Supervisors-PLDT (GUTS-PLDT), Digital Justice, Computer Professionals Union, May Day Multimedia, Ecumenical Institute for Labor Education and Research.

A study reported that the use of AI affects 36% or 8.5 million jobs in the Philippines. Three million of these are clerical jobs, over 2.5 million in sales and service, 500,000 technical jobs and related professions, and 700,000 professional jobs. Nearly two of every 10 jobs in these fields are set to be displaced.

The BPO industry alone expects to lose 300,000 jobs in the next five years due to AI. Currently, many companies in the industry use AI for routine clerical work and answering customer inquiries. Workers are pressured to increase their work output using AI without an equivalent increase in wages and benefits.

What is AI? AI refers to computer technology having the ability to mimic human intelligence such as language comprehension, pattern recognition, problem solving and decision making. One of its types is called “generative” AI which can create text, image, music and video from vast public information stored on the internet.

Digital companies, in chorus with the Philippine fascist state, boast that AI will create new jobs in the country. However, according to CODE-AI, the estimated 100,000 new jobs created for AI will not recover the number of jobs that it will eliminate. In addition, the Philippines is considered a “digital sweatshop”: the type of AI-related work passed on to Filipinos is mainly on repetitive tasks, such as data annotation and content moderation, which are both jobs to “train” various types of AI. The pay for these jobs is low ($1–$3/hour), far compared to workers doing the same job in other countries ($15/hour, if in the US). Workers here have no job security, and have no protection from abuse.

Even now, tens of thousands of workers and professionals in the Philippines are working for foreign digital companies as “freelancers”. They compete against one another for the few jobs these offer, including on social media platforms such as Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram) and foreign state agencies such as the US. Many of them are fresh graduates who cannot find work in their respective fields.

AI technology is controlled by a few monopoly companies based in the US. One of the largest is OpenAI which created GPT. Social media platforms also have their own AI technology such as Meta’s Llama, Google’s Gemini and Twitter’s Grok. This February, a Chinese company Deepseek introduced its own AI model.

AI technology definitely improves the production process, especially in repetitive, simple and boring jobs. However, because it is owned and controlled by monopoly capitalists, it will undeniably be used against workers, especially in backward countries like the Philippines, where they do not enjoy rights.